University of Oregon group gives students hands-on experience with NIL deals

The dust is still settling and rules are still being revised following a U.S. Supreme Court action in 2021 that changed college athletics. The decision allowed student athletes to strike deals with companies and make money off of their name, image and likeness, or NIL. But the courts didn’t say a lot about how those deals would work.

Four years later, students at University of Oregon are figuring it out on the fly, through a program aimed at helping student-athletes, as well as marketing and journalism majors interested in careers in this rapidly evolving field of sports business.

On a recent spring afternoon, junior Ellie Watson found herself at a Eugene Dutch Bros, following a member of UO’s acrobatics and tumbling program around with a video camera.

“Can I get a medium Aftershock Rebel, please?” acrobat and tumbler Emily Rezner asked the Dutch Bros worker, who responded by asking the sophomore athlete if she’d like the energy drink on ice or blended.

“I’ll do iced,” she said while looking down at her retriever/spaniel mix, Maverick. “And then, could I also do a pup cup?”

Watson shot video from inside the drive-through coffee shop as Rezner collected her items. Minutes later, Watson circled Maverick, filming as the canine worked his tongue around the inside of a blue and white cup of whipped cream.

A UO junior originally from Columbus, Ohio, Watson is a member of the Oregon Accelerator. It’s a student-run organization where business and journalism majors create teams that, among other things, work with Oregon athletes like Rezner to fulfill contracts with brands such as Dutch Bros. Accelerator members also help athletes create personal brands and understand changing rules around NIL partnerships.

The students from the Accelerator can’t negotiate deals for the athletes — Rezner independently made contact with Dutch Bros — but they can help create content for a brand contract.

The footage Watson took, along with photographs from UO grad student Myelle Norton, will be turned into social media content for Rezner. Junior sports business major Alex Seidel set up the logistics for the shoot as the account manager.

In this case, Watson and her fellows from the Accelerator were helping Rezner and another athlete shoot photos and videos for social media posts showing them with Dutch Bros cups in hand. Watson said she’s considering a career in sports videography. Working for the Accelerator gives her a glimpse into what that could look like.

“I can go into, hopefully, a sports career having an understanding of the business side of athletics,” Watson said, “and the kind of work that’s required to have these collaborations with these big brands such as Dutch Bros or Best Roofing or local businesses around Eugene.”

For the Dutch Bros assignment, Watson got the call a day before the shoot from fellow Accelerator members asking if she was free. She started brainstorming ideas right away, based on briefs her Accelerator colleagues and Dutch Bros sent to her about what to expect at the coffee shop.

“Dutch Bros was actually really easy to work with because they gave us a list of dos and don’ts,” Watson said, “which was nice because I knew exactly what I wasn’t supposed to shoot.”

A little certainty is welcome. As Watson points out, the rules around how college athletes can represent brands and get paid have been in flux for years. Since the 2021 court decision, guidelines and legalities around NIL have been murky at best — and laws and policies are changing in real time.

That means the Oregon Accelerator has also had to evolve.

Sports business administration major Julia Rood doesn’t know any different. She signed up with the Accelerator her freshman year, mere months after the Supreme Court made the opportunity possible.

“Athletes just didn’t know what the opportunities were, what they could do,” Rood said. “Obviously there’s the big athletes who [have] deals come to them. But then there’s athletes who don’t have as big of a following, or aren’t as big of names, and didn’t have any idea what they could do.”

Rood has held many roles with the Accelerator. Her freshman year the program was more about educating athletes about the rules around NIL partnerships. That’s still true, but the group now helps athletes create content, develop their own brands, and explore community projects that could fit under the large umbrella of NIL deals, such as starting a sports camp in an athlete’s hometown.

“We’re there as like a safety net, almost, because we have a whole team dedicated to understanding the things that are changing and making sure we’re complying with all the rules,” Rood said. “From there, it’s taking it to the next level of what can we make happen within those rules.”

Rood spent her senior year as general manager for Oregon Accelerator. She just graduated, and instead of going back to her hometown near Boston, she’s moving just 100 miles north of Eugene. Rood’s Accelerator experience helped her land a paid internship at an advertising agency in Portland.

Ultimately, Rood would love to work in athlete representation, especially on the marketing side. Her dream job would be with a professional women’s soccer player or team.

Just south of the Eugene Dutch Bros is the U of O journalism school. In her office there, public relations instructor Kelli Matthews explained how she helped launch Oregon Accelerator.

“By the time the Supreme Court decision was made,” Matthews said, “it was clear that there was a real potential for students to get some experiential learning.”

Matthews said a donor wanted to see a partnership between the journalism, business and athletics programs at Oregon. And they wanted it to be student-driven.

Matthews echoes students Rood and Watson when talking about how the program has evolved.

“Part of the challenge we had, especially early on, was that it was so unknown,” Matthews said. “There were so many aspects of NIL regulation — or lack of regulation — and what we were able to do or not do.”

She said it took a couple years for Oregon Accelerator to find its place, but now it functions like a sports marketing agency or a creative firm. The program has carved out a specialty in attracting athletes that might not have private, professional representation like a football star might have. That includes students from sports like softball, track and field, soccer and acrobatics and tumbling.

As the Dutch Bros photo shoot came to an end, Watson and her Accelerator colleagues drove back toward campus.

“Ideally, I would love to work in the NFL or NHL as a team videographer,” Watson said on the car ride. “I really enjoy the production side and post-production.”

This fall, she’ll take over as creative director of Oregon Accelerator — an opportunity she doesn’t think she’d have at any other university in the country.

“The NIL space is really up in the air,” Watson said. “It changes every day. To have a space like this where it’s a solidified thing that, no matter what’s going on there’s always going to be a place where we can go and work and figure it out, I think that’s definitely something that’s special to Oregon.”